Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  12.In America, more non-white women of all ages develop diseases and die prematurely than do white women. The non-white infant mortality and adolescent suicide rate is significantly higher than comparable white rates. Many Third World women must raise their children alone, either with tragically inadequate welfare stipends, or with salaries that are significantly lower than those of employed black, Hispanic, and white males. Women’s prisons in America house predominantly Third World women who have committed petty economic crimes and/or who have been battered and have killed their batterers in self-defense.

  13and 14.In tropical Africa, although the birth rate is very high, the maternal death rate is alarming, and the infant death rate in certain regions is as high as 150–400 per 1000 live births. While most women in Africa have traditionally always worked strenuously in childbearing and rearing, in agriculture and/or commerce, they have not been political, military, or religious leaders as often as men have, nor has polyandry existed as often as polygamy. There have, however, been many female queens and warriors in Africa—as forgotten as their South American, Asian, and European counterparts. To date, most African revolutionary political leaders, militarists, judges, and priests are men, not women. The genital mutilation of women still exists in certain African countries.

  Today, AIDS has a female face in Africa. Mass gang-rapes have characterized tribal and ethnic warfare, especially in Rwanda and Sudan where genocide has also occurred.

  15.Athenian Red-figured Pottery, 450 B. C.

  Most women are shocked and astounded by scenes of female warriors, who are victorious in physical battles with men or, for that matter, victorious against natural forces or political opponents. (Military or epic-romantic violence is also a metaphor for other definitive actions.) In Greek art, victors traditionally move from left to right (or from “feminine” to “masculine”). Here is a victorious, mounted Amazon, riding right, about to spear a fallen Greek. The helmeted Greek is about to spear another Amazon, who turns in her flight to defend herself with her ax, while her exceedingly graceful and muscular companion raises her ax in both hands to assist her. The Amazon on horseback is wearing boots with fur tops.

  All the figures are red. The full battle scene, depicted on the urn, is not shown in this photograph. It includes five other Amazons, one driving a chariot and two others watching part of the total battle between six Greeks and seven Amazons.

  16.Athenian Red-figured Pottery, V-IV Century B. C.

  A bearded Greek, wearing stockings, and a helmet decorated with a dolphin (a symbol of the origin, divinity, and tragedy of the male child) is attacked by two Amazons. The saber-wielding Amazon cuts a joyful, almost transcendent figure. She wears shoes, long sleeves, and trousers under a belted tunic, and an oriental cap.

  Amazon weapons depicted in Greek art include axes, sabers (swords), bows and arrows (usually of the Scythian variety), shields, and spears. Animals such as panthers, lions, and dogs are shown on Amazon shields. The Amazons sometimes wear greaves, Attic or Thracian helmets, and oriental caps (with or without mantles). Footwear includes boots, shoes, sandals, ankle straps—and bare feet. In some battle and many non-battle scenes, Amazons are shown wearing short tunics and jewelry. There is evidence that Amazon societies existed in Africa, in the Mediterranean and Aegean regions, near the Black Sea, and in South America.

  17and 18.“Wounded Amazon,” Roman copy of Greek statue attributed to Polykle-itos or Kresilas, 440–430 B.C. This marble Roman copy of a Greek sculpture stands 6 feet 8 1/4 inches high. The Amazon is wearing a short belted chiton and an ankle strap. Her hair is short, parted, and combed back. She is said to be wounded in or above her right breast (the breast, or rather the lacteal gland, purportedly burned off in childhood in Amazon tribes). This woman is intensely beautiful, rhythmical, and serene.

  WOMEN

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SEX BETWEEN PATIENT AND THERAPIST

  To the Daddy’s Girls we were—and are no longer— I dedicate this poem and chapter.

  SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING BLUE

  More and more lately,

  there’s a man

  on my couch

  talking about his

  girl friend or his wife.

  I’ve always loved

  to borrow things

  from women:

  library books, perfume, cigarettes and shawls delicious

  this dressing up for Daddy,

  and as safe

  as playing a part

  in a play

  that must end

  before bedtime.

  So I listen,

  a gravely curious

  little girl,

  with eyes so clear

  a woman can

  drown in them

  silently.

  Phyllis Chesler

  1970

  “I am a doctor of the soul” [the Guru] said quietly. “I am certainly not interested in that silly little body of yours…. [Under my guidance you will learn] control of your senses, whereby you may come at will—instantaneous orgasm at my command…. [Regard my erection] impersonally, not as an object of love, but as a demonstration of spiritual advancement.” [The Guru teaches Candy various yoga exercises, some of which] … in any other context would suggest the sexual and perhaps even the obscene. Candy crossly blamed herself for making the association and attributed it to her own insecure and underdeveloped spirit. [When Candy’s period is overdue, the Guru] gives her a plane ticket to Tibet [where Candy meets a holy man in a Buddhist temple]. Candy began her meditation at once, concentrating all her attention on a single spot, the tip of Buddha’s nose. It was wonderful for her—all her life she had been needed by someone else—mostly boys—and now at last she had found someone that she herself needed … Buddha!

  [The temple is struck by lightning and, with the dung-crusted holy man seated beside her, they watch as] the huge Buddha … toppled forward, pitching headlong to the temple floor in a veritable explosion. Although it seemed to fall right on top of them, Candy and the holy man were miraculously unscathed, and were left bunched together…. In fact, she felt the holy man’s taut member ease an inch or two into her tight little lamb-pit. [And pressing against her] was a section of her beloved Buddha’s face—the nose! And a truly incredible thing was happening—it was slipping into Candy’s marvelous derrière … it was then she realized … that wonder of wonders, the Buddha, too, needed her! She gave herself up fully to her idol, stroking his cheek, as she gradually began the esoteric Exercise Number Four—and only realizing after a minute that this movement was having a definite effect on the situation in her honey-cloister as well, forcing the holy man’s member deeply in and out as it did, and she turned to him at once, wanting to tell him that it wasn’t meant the way it seemed certainly, but she was stricken dumb by what she saw—for the warm summer rain had worked its wonders there as well, washing the crust of dung and ash away as the eyes glittered terrifically while the hopeless ecstasy of his huge pent-up spasm began, and sweet Candy’s melodious voice rang out through the temple in truly mixed feelings: “GOOD GRIEF—IT’S DADDY!”

  Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg,

  Candy

  If only twenty-five percent of these specific reports [made by women about having had sexual relations with their therapists] are correct, there is still an overwhelming issue confronting professionals in this field.

  William Masters and Virginia Johnson

  DRAMATIC OR EXTREME FORMS OF EXPLOITATION always signify the pervasiveness of less dramatic forms. Atrocities and scandals are often everyday events—writ large. Physical brutality in American state mental asylums and prisons signifies the dailiness of brutality in the “outside” society. Prostitution,1 rape,2 incest, and sexual molestation of female children by adult males are so common they are usually invisible—except when sensationalistic accounts focus them, distortedly, into view.3

  Female prostitution and harems have existed among all races, in nearly every recorded culture,
on every continent, and in all centuries: it predates Judaism, Catholicism and industrial capitalism. It always signifies the relatively powerless position of women and their widespread sexual repression. It usually also signifies their exclusion from or subordination within the economic, political, religious, and military systems.

  “Sex” between private female patients and their male psychotherapists is probably no more common—or uncommon—an occurrence than is “sex” between a female secretary or housekeeper and her male employer. From a financial point of view, the therapist and not his patient is the employee. Psychologically, however, the female is as much—if not more—a dependent supplicant here as she is elsewhere.4 Both instances generally involve an older male figure and a young female figure.5 The male transmits “unconscious” signals of power, “love,” wisdom, and protection, signals to which the female has been conditioned to respond automatically. Such a transaction between patient and therapist, euphemistically termed “seduction” or “part of the treatment process,” is legally a form of rape and psychologically, a form of incest.6 The sine qua non of “feminine” identity in patriarchal society is the violation of the incest taboo, i.e., the initial and continued “preference” for Daddy, followed by the approved falling in love with and/or marrying of powerful father figures.

  Men may marry mother figures but only if they are safely powerless. Wives are generally younger, less mobile, and physically smaller than their husbands—and than their husbands’ childhood mother. Men do not violate the incest taboo; they do not re-create certain crucial conditions of their childhood in marriage.

  There is no real questioning of “feminine” identity in psychotherapy. More often, an adjustment to it is preached—through verbal or sexual methods.

  Although there are many individual therapists and several therapist “families” in New York and California who have systematically preached and practiced “sex” with their female patients for over a decade, such intercourse is by no means a recent innovation. There are even therapists who “specialize” in treating other therapists’ “guilt” or “conflict” about having sexual relations with their patients. Many analysts in Freud’s time had love affairs or married their female patients—when the comparatively short (three- to six-month) treatment process was completed. Paul Roazen reports that Reich’s first wife, Bernfeld’s last wife, Rado’s third wife, and one of Fenichel’s wives were former patients; that Freud’s disciple Tausk had a love affair with a former female patient, sixteen years his junior; and that Freud himself encouraged a prominent American analyst to marry a former patient.7

  It is now known that Carl Jung had an affair with his patient Sabina Spielrein. Judd Marmor writes about the “tragic end of the career” of W. Bern Wolfe, a gifted psychiatrist who was forced to flee the United States in the 1930s for “impairing the morals of a girl whom he had under treatment,”8 the late James L. McCartney, who encouraged “sex” between male therapists and their female patients (when “necessary”), claims that a number of well-known psychiatrists (Hadley, Sullivan, Alexander, and Reich) “told him, despite their writings to the contrary, that they allowed their patients physically to act out.”9 Freud is quoted by Marmor as chiding Ferenczi on his habit of kissing his patients:

  If you start with a kiss [you risk an ultimately very] lively scene … Ferenczi, gazing at the lively scene he has created, will perhaps say to himself, maybe I should have halted my technique of motherly affection.10

  I do not seek a simple alliance with those Puritans who censure all forms of doctor-patient contact. I am not in favor of great and grave professional distances between people, especially between therapists and patients. (Many “schizophrenics” need and should have access to specifically physical contact.) Puritanism usually implies an acceptance of the myth of “feminine evil.” For example, Leon J. Saul, in an article condemning patient-therapist sexual contact, is more sensitive to the analyst’s than to the patient’s vulnerability.11 He says: “Let the analyst beware. In the face of sexual love needs, let him recall the Lorelei and Delilah and the many other beauties who have revealed that appearance need not be reality … if the analyst is tempted to follow Ferenczi in experimenting with Eros let him be certain … [that] no matter how obvious Eros may be, hostility is the inevitable middle link.”

  There are many kinds of “distance,” other than sexual, to be tenderly and/or experimentally bridged between therapist and patient. However, “sexual” contact does not necessarily insure any other kind of communication: it often impedes it. Most important is the fact that most such “sexual” contacts take place between middle-aged male therapists and younger female patients.12 It does not usually occur between female therapists and male (or female) patients of any age; or between male therapists and male patients, unless the therapist is homosexual.13 Dahlberg reports one case of an attempted seduction by a male homosexual therapist.14 The male patient, who was also homosexual, refused his advances. Perhaps men are more conditioned than women to refuse sexual encounters that they do not initiate, cannot control, or in which they see neither pleasure nor profit.

  The fact of the matter is that sexually seductive (or assaultive) therapists are quite ordinary in their ethical failure. Despite their occasional pretenses of being radicals whom society crucifies, they are not very “radical,” i.e., they do not perceive or challenge basic assumptions and social behavior.* For example, they are generally extremely anti-homosexual and anti-lesbian. McCartney, who was ousted from the American Psychiatric Association for publicly favoring “overt transference,” limits it to overt heterosexual transference.15 He recommends “transferring” his sexually aroused male patients to a female therapist—or sends them home to “practice” on their wives and girl friends. McCartney notes that “it is not so easy for a female [as for a male] analysand to find a [sexual] surrogate, so the analyst may have to remain objective and yet react appropriately, in order to lead the immature person into full [heterosexual] maturity.” McCartney also seems to measure “success” in terms of the female patients’ subsequent marriage and maternity. Further, McCartney treats his female patients who are in need of “overt transference” (sex) as children: he asks for their parents’ or husbands’ permission before sexual contact occurs. Most important, he recommends that the therapist remain as emotionally uninvolved, as removed from risk-taking, as “performance”-oriented, as a Playboy stereotype. He emphasizes the distinction between “transference love” and “romantic love,” and describes the therapist’s role as passive, unemotional, and “responsive” to the patient’s initiative. Perhaps male therapists, like male artists in our society, are seen, or fear themselves, as more “feminine” than business executives, soldiers, or politicians. Thus, it is important to them to be able to “have” as many women as their presumably more “masculine” counterparts do. Male poets and novelists are as notorious (as they are “forgiven”) for their frantic and sexually selfish and abusive treatment of women. Some psychotherapists, although less inspired, may behave similarly.

  Dr. Charles Dahlberg presents the seductive therapist as a man who chose to practice psychotherapy between 1930 and 1945, and who was probably

  withdrawn and introspective, studious, passive, shy … [more] intellectually [than] physically adventurous … among other things, this adds up to being unpopular with the opposite sex. None of this stops a person from having fantasies of sexual conquest. It may well encourage sexual fantasies.16

  Such typically “deprived” men now find themselves in a professional position where many young women may be expressing fantasies of sexual desire for them. The therapists can’t help being “flattered” by the situation; and they refuse to help, exploiting the situation for their own ends.

  Dahlberg, in his presentation of nine cases of patient-therapist “sexual” contact, draws a composite portrait of the “seductive” therapist as “always over forty; from ten to twenty-five years older than the patient; always a man; and with the [one] ex
ception of the homosexual, the patient is always a young female.” Most of Dahlberg’s nine therapists are married; many experience premature ejaculation with their patients; some “seduce” the wives of their male patients; some terminate therapy—or payment for therapy—once sexual contact begins; others continue both therapy and payment.

  Many of these therapists are what Dahlberg terms “grandiose.” He cites the example of one therapist who offered to “cure” his married female patient’s “frigidity” on a two-week holiday. The patient panicked, told her husband, and together they sought legal action. The suit wasn’t pursued because of the patient’s “paranoid” tendencies: the lawyers feared that the woman would not be believed and would lose the case. Another therapist hypnotized his female patient and then suggested to her that sexual contact might increase her “transferential” involvement with him. When she finally refused to pay for such treatment and began seeing another therapist, the first therapist told her he would continue seeing her for “sex,” and would not “charge” her for it—but wouldn’t listen to her “problems” any longer. Dahlberg’s paper presents only two cases where sexual contact occurred during therapy; four such contacts took place almost immediately after therapy was terminated, and three were propositions for sexual contact which never took place.

  I was interested in talking with women whose sexual contact with their therapists took place during treatment. I also spoke to five women who refused their therapists’ sexual propositions. Ten of the eleven women I interviewed had “sex” with their therapists during the treatment process. Five of these sexual contacts were initiated and continued in the therapist’s office. For seven of the women, therapy continued after such contact. Seven women continued paying for therapy for an average of four months. The duration of these contacts ranged from one night to eighteen months.